Blizzard Issues DMCA Notice to a Fan-Run 'WoW' Legacy Server (torrentfreak.com)

An anonymous reader calls it "the never-ending stupidity of copyright wars." TorrentFreak reports: Blizzard Entertainment is taking a stand against a popular World of Warcraft legacy server. The fan-operated project allows gamers to experience how the game was played over a decade ago and to revive old battles... In recent years the project has captured the hearts of tens of thousands of die-hard WoW fans. At the time of writing, the most popular realm has more than 6,000 people playing from all over the world... Blizzard, however, sees this as copyright infringement and has asked GitHub to pull the site's code offline.
The article notes the DMCA notice came "just weeks after several organizations and gaming fans asked the US Copyright Office to make a DMCA circumvention exemption for 'abandoned' games."

Comments

Blizzard Issues DMCA Notice to a Fan-Run 'WoW' Leg

[zifn4b]

Blizzard Issues DMCA Notice to a Fan-Run 'WoW' Leg

No. They issued the DMCA notice to GITHUB. Terrible summary.

Blizzard has asked GitHub to pull the site's code offline.

Blizzard asked Github to take down ONE file. Github complied because they are located in the United States. Light's Hope on the other hand is run outside of the United States so there is absolutely no jurisdiction for Blizzard to take it down and they can't really stop the code from being disseminated. Blizzard is just quite frankly wasting their time and money.

Debatable

[DrYak]

If you look in the URL linked in the summary (Yeah I know, /. and actual article reading) :
it might seem debatable.

The complains hinge around 2-3 sql file using names and having a few data that looks like the data used in wow (spells have the same characteristic as old versions of wow, same old trademarked names are used, etc.).

Fantasy Names – “Script” files and folders are named after and reference WoW fantasy names.

They're not complaining about game assets being lifted of blizzard's own software (e.g.: bitmaps, etc.)
They are complaining about the code using official Blizzard trademarked name to designate Blizzard's said trademarked characters.
(Note: e.g. it's not a trademark violation when you use microsoft's trademarked "Microsoft Windows" name to speak about Microsoft Windows itself).

They're complaining that the datamodel is very close to how it used to be in old servers :

The LightsHope spell table has identical layout and typically identical field names as the table from early WoW. We use database tables to represent game data, like spells, in WoW. In our code, we use .sql files to represent the data layout of each table (i.e. the fields of each specific table, like a spell name or the magnitude of its effect). MaNGOS, the platform off of which Light’s Hope appears to be built, uses a similar structure. The LightsHope spell_template table matches almost exactly the layout and field names of early WoW client database tables.

(Looks like the devs made their "Classic" recreation by using old dumps / backups as a referrence).

Matching Record IDs – There are “scripts” that reference database records directly by ID; there are cases where these IDs directly match the ID from WoW’s content.

"Hey, their serial numbers looks suspiciously close to our serial numbers !"
Oh, come one.
(Numbers aren't copyrightable in the US. That's basically Intel complaining that competitor's 386-compatible chip also use numbers like 386)

None of the complain is anything that looks like : "these huges chunks of code are actually a un-licensed copy of the network code of our server".

Overall : Some of the complain could almost fell under the "but these old numbers are necessary to get interoperation" exemption that exists to copyright in some jurisdiction (other /.ers have mentioned Canada as an example).